Collaborative ethnography with children and young people: Displaying Complex Cultures

in Writing and Art

Steve PoolKate Pahl

29th March 2012

Questions

• How can children’s voices be heard?• What methods allow children’s voices to be

heard?• History of Creative Partnerships• Research as agentive• Social science as constructing the field

Some of our projects

• A Reason to Write (2009-10)• Writing in the Home and in the Street (2010-11)• We have worked collaboratively and published

together including Pahl, et al (2009) and Pahl and Pool (2011)

• Reciprocal mode of working focusing on intersection between lived experience and art methods

Some of our influences

• Eric Lassiter, Collaborative Ethnography (2005)• Grant Kestor, Conversation Pieces (2004)• Les Back, The Art of Listening (2007)• Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution. • Sarah Pink Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009)• Richard Sennett (2012) Together• John Law After Method (2004)

A Reason to Write

• Artist, musician and a photographer plus a researcher for 2 years in the school

• In first year, focused on children’s Reasons to Write• Project became focused on relationship between the

place and what were the children’s reasons to make meaning.

• In second year research was participatory• Funded by Cape, UK

Hinterland

• Focus on participatory methodologies• Children investigated how the artists helped them

learn in the classroom.• They used FLIP videos, still images and group

discussion to collect and analyse data• Extended reflective discussions where final images

were decided on• Focus on living your life, and loss

Living your life

Courtney: Its not about being good all the time at school its about spending your life in school because it is the only chance you’ve got

Kate: You said something else about drama and in between…

C: When you are in drama you can act out but you can also act out in school its about spending your life, and its is not just about drama you can just live your life

Robbie: Before it, Declan he said, let me video you, he said no, I went to take picture, Declan danced like that, I took a picture, it went all blurring so we deleted that one, we were going to do loads so we could like just place finger and make it into a video

SP: animationA: We were all like messing about Declan started dancingR: It’s a good picture though I like the picture

Declan Dancing

C: Its like the playground, its your life that you are doing, cos is our last year in this school so

R: And I can’t wait to leaveC: And its Declan’s nextC: Fairhill is going to be a different school and in

two years its going to change

• The messy nature of the project clouds the gap between the emic and etic

• it is more difficult to own something when you don't know where the edges are.

• The shared epistemological space recognised that young people were intuitive in second stage data analysis

• we needed a system which was non hierachical

• Mess was important in this as was the abandonment of systematic ordering of data as the connections and taxonomies we would develop were not the children’s.

• Declan dancing - playground footage selected by pupils as points of "Acting out" " been yourself" a connection which may not of arisen if we had applied systems which did not allow this juxtaposition (Outside play for example)

Some concerns

• How we manage the vast data set we might collect in relation to children’s expectations of ‘fairness’ and inclusion within the classroom?

• How do we manage classroom and researcher time constraints?

• Whose data is it and what is the hierarchy?• Technical determinism as a difficulty

Writing in home and in the Street

• Stimulus was video made by Steve Pool and Richard Steadman-Jones about the writing they found in the East Herringthorpe area

• Children responded by conducting a series of walk arounds

• They then produced a film and two PowerPoints that were shown to the School Improvement Service and at the ESRC festival

Writing in the street

Kate: When you see a nasty word do you think it is good or bad?

Marianne: Bad. We have got it on our gates someone wrote it! When I first moved into my house there was graffiti all over the wall and they had had a paintball fight. You can still see it, it were black and it were white and it was hard to get off. Me granddad had to do that. (Discussion in the street recorded in June 2011)

Kate: I want to know what you think of the graffiti on this slide?

Luke: It’s all rude! We should spray it. It’s not fair on young children

Outputs need to evolve from the project

• Article– Different ways of working– Abandoning social science approaches – school response

• Film– Specific audience for specific purpose

• Book– Exhibition space as conferring value and ownership

Some thoughts

• Research with children sometimes runs counter to their ideas of what research is or can be

• Embedded practice as a form of praxis• Spatial epistemologies – looking for holding

forms where this can happen• Bringing together participatory with the

academic

Our experience

• The choice of ‘holding form’ has to be congruent with children’s experience of the affordances of that holding form

• Purpose and audience is vital• What is the" purpose" of developing this

approach?• How does this way of working differ from

other research "With young people“?

John Law (2004)

So the real is real enough. It is obdurate. It cannot be wished away. But it is also made. And in some measure that which is socially real is made by, and through, the instruments of social analysis. If this is right then the political grammar of social investigation undergoes an interesting shift. The issue is not simply how what is out there can be uncovered and brought to light, though this remains an important issue. It is also about what might be made in the relations of investigation, what might be brought into being.

• Messy kitchens – you can clean a little space in the clutter to cook in

• Or you can make a big space and clear everything up before you start to cook

• Positivism makes you want to clean everything up before you cook a meal.